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Celebrate Presidents Day – Read a Comic

Happy Presidents Day! It’s that time of year again when the United States celebrates that we have a President in our form of government! Pretty exciting stuff!

Actually, there are some pretty crazy stories from the life and times of US Presidents past. And sometimes their deaths can make for some compelling reading too. Sure, it’s morbid but it can also be pretty fascinating. Comics writer/artist Rick Geary has taken a look at two presidential assassinations with the same precision and accessibility of all of his work. His series of graphic novels A Treasury of Victorian Murder (and the newer series A Treasury of XXth Century Murder) make for great reads, and pre-dates a lot of the current non-fiction graphic novels coming out nowadays.

The Murder of Abraham Lincoln by Rick Geary

In The Murder of Abraham Lincoln, Geary takes a look at the 1865 murder of the 16th US President and the days that followed. Some of the recently resurrected theories about John Wilkes Booth surviving and living to old age while a body double was killed in his place at Garrett Farm aren’t included but it nevertheless is packed with information glazed over in high school history class while maintaining a great narrative. Geary also uses the power of comics well, weaving in a cutaway of the Presidential Box at the Ford’s Theatre as Booth makes his fatal move, maps and a timeline of Booth’s escape route, and a map showing the route taken by the Lincoln funeral train.

Geary also took a look at the second US President to be killed in The Fatal Bullet: The Assassination of President James A. Garfield.

See NBM Publishing for a complete list of Geary’s true crime graphic novels currently in-print.